David Wahl on Creativity and Marketing

A story is better than a statistic (four out of five storytellers agree)

One of the rules of writing advertising copy is that a story is always better than a statistic.

Statistics have their place in copywriting (four out of five dentists recommend this gum), but only when they’re backed up with a story illustrating the statistics. One picture of a starving child motivates more people to give money than a sentence saying there are millions of starving children in the world.

Why not challenge yourself to take a statistic you use all the time and turn it into a story?

Especially if your story goes against the grain of the statistic.

One of my favorite things to do on Yelp is to find the exceptional (4.9 stars!) restaurants and businesses and read the one-star reviews. They often tell the story of why they’re such a successful business. They eject someone loudly talking on their cell phone during a meal or a reviewer didn’t like that the person taking the order didn’t speak perfect English and they had to repeat themselves.

Look at a statistic somewhere and think about it from both sides. Tell a story that grows from just looking at the numbers. Put the empathy and emotion back into the statistics that were drawn out of them when they were turned into a graphic for a CNN story.

Who is the dentist that won’t recommend sugar-free gum? Why would someone vote for a candidate that doesn’t represent their interests? Who doesn’t want to move out of a neighborhood when the real estate prices are so high they would triple their money?

Every statistic is really just a boring package wrapped in brown paper filled with interesting stories just waiting for you to unpack them.